In some ad-hoc wireless networks, medium access is controlled in a distributed manner through signaling sent and received by the contending nodes. The MAC protocol used in such systems normally assigns a statistically fair share of the medium, e.g., communications resources, to communications links on a long time scale. However, some applications, e.g. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), multimedia etc., are sensitive to the scheduling delay and delay jitter and often require a certain Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee on a shorter time scale than is often provided for. In some systems, nodes with a high QoS status can get higher priority to access resources than other nodes with a lower QoS status.
Usually the QoS privileges that are given to a device are unrestricted meaning that the QoS privileges and signaling can potentially be used by the authorized device all or almost all the time. As a result, QoS privileges can be abused by applications running on an authorized user device, e.g., by using a high QoS privilege for a low priority application.
In such cases, the applications running on the user terminal can assert QoS even when they do not need any QoS and can hog a large portion of the resources. There is no incentive for the applications to restrict themselves from the using the QoS privileges.
Based on the above discussion there is a need for new methods and apparatus for controlling access to communications resources in a communications system which improves upon the known approaches for allocating and/or controlling access to communications resources in a communications system based on QoS privileges, e.g., a system without centralized control of resource allocation and/or use.